How To Check Your Ranking On Google Accurately?

Google’s personalised search was launched on December 4, 2009. The reason behind launching this feature was to help people get better search results. Before this, personalized search was only offered to signed-in users, and only when they have web history enabled on the Google Accounts. Some of the features that make up a personalised search include: Starred Results, Social Search, Real Time Search, Location, search or web history, cookies, and cache. Quite a few SEO practitioners can be confused over how personalised searches are affecting keyword rankings on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

A little background of how it works: If you search “basketball shoes” and you often click on www.shoes.com from the SERP, Google will rank www.shoes.com higher on the SERP the next time you search for “basketball shoes“.

For marketers and SEO practitioners who check their rankings everyday and sometimes click on their listing, the accuracy of their rankings could be compromised with personalised search. It will be quite important to get the “standard” SERP to understand how their website is performing when a normal user searches on Google.

Here are some ways to get accurate search engine results for Google:

1. Clean up you search history, cache, cookies on your browser.

2. Search from your cellphones or mobile phones.

3. You can use a “proxy site” [like vtunnel.com] on checking your ranking.

4. Sign out from your Google Account

5. Let someone do the checking, be sure your friend is in another country

6. Adding &pws=0 on the Google SERP URL [but some SEO’s told me that the &pws=0 parameter is no longer working, just try]
Example:

Instead of using: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=shoes&aq=f&aqi=g9g-z1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
Do it this way: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=shoes&aq=f&aqi=g9g-z1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pws=0

I’ve recently discovered that Rank Checker was inaccurate for Google rankings. I think this has been in the last few weeks. We use it to check the validity of our SEO software, even though we get the rankings straight from the Google API from a server in Dallas. Sometimes I think Google just wants to throw you off 🙂